The Yelp trap
When I bought The Village Chimney Sweep, the previous owners had spent years building up our Yelp page. Then Yelp started pulling some shenanigans. Reviews got hidden. Other businesses' ads started showing up on our page. I felt like I was being held hostage by a service I was paying for.
We kept at it anyway, because we had a system. Our technicians would share our Yelp link and ask for a review. It worked well enough that quitting felt like walking away from years of effort.
Finally I'd had enough, and I asked myself a better question: where do people in our industry actually go to find a good chimney sweep? Not Yelp. They go to Google. And our presence on Google was practically nonexistent.
So I sat down and built a Google Business Profile (it was called Google My Business back then) and filled it in with everything I could. Before that, our Google presence in 2018 was nothing. Zero reviews.
The easiest system I've ever set up
Not long after, Housecall Pro released a setting that automatically asks for a review once a job is complete. I turned it on, decided where our reviews would go, and let it run. That was it. I toggled a button and never thought about it again. That was years ago.
I don't ask anyone for anything. A job gets finished, a link goes out, and the customer can click it if they feel like it or ignore it if they don't. There's no awkward conversation and no pressure on them or on me.
What happened
As of this week, our Google listing shows a 5.0 rating across 723 reviews. Every one of them came in after I flipped that switch.
One customer told us in their review that they had looked at all those five-star reviews and assumed a company couldn't really be that good, so they hired us to find out. They decided we were. That's the part I love. A stranger doubted us, booked anyway, and the reviews did the convincing before I ever got on the phone.
The two things people get wrong
They don't realize how much reviews help them
Once you start getting reviews, more strangers start booking with you. It's a flywheel. Reviews bring in new customers, new customers leave reviews, and the whole thing builds on itself. Every month a business owner puts this off is a month of momentum they never get back.
They think a review system is a big deal
It isn't. Most owners avoid it because they don't want to bother people. So don't bother them. Send a link. They can click the button if they want to take the time, or ignore it. No big deal.
There are about a billion automated systems that can do this for you.
"Pick one, turn it on, and never think about it again."
— Emily Martinez
It's the same build-it-once, let-it-run idea I wrote about in what an automated stay-in-touch system actually looks like, and a review request is one of the easiest pieces to start with.
If you only have two hours this week
Things are changing fast right now. People are using AI for search, and plenty of marketers are chattering about new strategies to get found by it. I like simple. Google is big, it's adapting to stay relevant, and it's still free. New customers reliably find businesses there.
So if you have two hours and want to do the thing that moves the needle most on getting found, do these three things:
- Build and optimize your Google Business Profile.
- Get a review system that sends an automatic text to your customers right after you complete the job.
- Connect that review system back to your Google Business Profile.
That might change at some point. When it does, you can switch to a different platform. You don't need to solve for the future before you've done the simple thing that works today.
If you want help building the review piece step by step, review requests are one of the five systems in my $25 course pack, How I Automated My Local Biz with 5 Simple Systems, and each system is built to be done in about an afternoon.
The takeaway
You don't have to get comfortable asking for reviews. You just have to take yourself out of the asking.
Turn on the system, point it at Google, and let it run for years.
